Giving New Meaning to Parenting

As part of my continuing efforts to be a calm parent, I’ve been trying (again) to solve the room-cleaning issue.
I’ll wait while you finish laughing.
Soooo, anyway, I’ve been trying to give that one over to the boys more. We ask the boys to straighten up their rooms every night before bed. In my [...]

Here I am again, talking about kids and cleaning up. Are you getting sick of it yet? Hope not!
Today I walked into the office and the wireless keyboard was sitting in the middle of the floor, ready to be crushed by someone who wasn’t watching the floor carefully. I mentioned to [...]

I’d love your opinions on this one. Today The Mercenary (age 10) approached me with a toy in his hand, saying “A visiting friend played with my toy and left it on the floor and TechnoBoy just stepped on it and broke it. So which one of them is going to buy me [...]

Things are back to normal here after my younger son’s (YS) surgery. Well, maybe I should clarify that. While he was officially cleared this morning and my MIL left last week, we are attempting to get back into our daily schedule. Except that there’s one not so small problem: the bad [...]

Last weekend, I had plans to sleep in. And I mean SLEEP IN. As any mother knows, that really translates to laying in bed until 9, ’cause key-ripes 5:30 am, everyday? Sucks. Because my children are 6 and 7, and well-trained, I can occasionally do this. Having a relaxing morning experience with Aftermath is a [...]

There have been too many times over the last year where I’ve stood at the doorway to my son’s play area (not a real room, just a small space behind the living room) and felt pretty sick over the giant mess of toys.
I’ve felt sick over the mess – the enormous, tangled mess of little [...]

It was very late at night. My flight home from Philadelphia had been delayed by over two hours. I was exhausted. I opened the door to what I had feared I would find.
A mess.
I’d been away for the weekend, and I’d suspected that I might have to pay for it when I [...]